Over the last year or so, I’ve been pondering on the ideas behind Wabi-sabi, the Japanese Buddhist concept of existence involving impermanence, suffering and emptiness. This has led to a new body of work called Insignificance that explores the transient nature of our individual lives.

I’ve been taking hundreds of photos of insignificant things and writing 100-word stories about them using autobiographical, historical and fictional elements.

It is my first foray into micro-literature and I wrote the stories as metaphors for the prejudice and powerlessness we experience at some time in our lives.

To make these incidental moments more legitimate, I turned to Significance 2.0, a process used by museums and galleries to assign meaning and value to the objects in their collections by contextualising them against significant people, events, ideas or things.

For my collection, I sorted the image and story into five categories:

• Wounds, scars and transgressions
• Delible and indelible marks
• Corners and inescapable places
• Lost, abandoned and set aside
• Shadows, reflections and light ephemera

I referenced each against the rise and set of the moon, as a touchstone of something large, unerring and something in constant transition.

Works displayed included 65 photos with stories, 12 moon portraits, an illuminated orb and a video floor projection by Andrew Brettell.

Insignificance was exhibited at 107 Projects in late 2019.

View the Insignificance catalogue of works.